Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/85

 of Prescott, in the bosom of the pine forests, amid the granite crags of the foot-hills of the Mogollon.

Camp Lowell, as the military post was styled, was located on the eastern edge of the town itself. In more recent years it has been moved seven or eight miles out to where the Riito is a flowing stream. We took up position close to the quartermaster's corral, erected such tents as could be obtained, and did much solid work in the construction of "ramadas" and other conveniences of branches. As a matter of comfort, all the unmarried officers boarded in the town, of which I shall endeavor to give a succinct but perfectly fair description as it impressed itself upon me during the months of our sojourn in the intervals between scouts against the enemy, who kept our hands full.

My eyes and ears were open to the strange scenes and sounds which met them on every side. Tucson was as foreign a town as if it were in Hayti instead of within our own boundaries. The language, dress, funeral processions, religious ceremonies, feasts, dances, games, joys, perils, griefs, and tribulations of its population were something not to be looked for in the region east of the Missouri River. I noted them all as well as I knew how, kept my own counsel, and give now the résumé of my notes of the time.

The "Shoo Fly" restaurant, which offered the comforts of a home to the weary wayfarer in Tucson, Arizona, circa 1869, was named on the principle of "lucus à non lucendo"—the flies wouldn't shoo worth a cent. Like the poor, they remained always with us. But though they might bedim the legend, "All meals payable in advance," they could not destroy the spirit of the legend, which was the principle upon which our most charming of landladies, Mrs. Wallen, did business.

Mrs. Wallen deserves more than the hasty reference she is receiving in these pages. She was a most attentive and well-meaning soul, understood the mysteries, or some of the mysteries, of the culinary art, was anxious to please, had never seen better days, and did not so much as pretend to have seen any, not even through a telescope.

She was not a widow, as the proprieties demanded under the circumstances—all landladies that I've ever read or heard of have been widows—but the circumstance that there was a male attached to the name of Wallen did not cut much of a figure in the case,